A Protestor holds a sign that reads in Spanish "The Government is terrorist," during a march to call for the return of 43 missing students, as well as the release of 11 people detained during a massive demonstration days earlier, in Mexico City, Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014. Nearly two months after the students disappeared following an attack by police, protests only continue to multiply, as citizens demand that the government find the missing students alive. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Our Spanish forefathers brought many blessings from Europe to America: horses, Christianity, beef, wheat, rice, government, the concept of private property, literacy, a mean streak of white racism and the mordida, the “bite.”

“Mordida:” Corruption, political and financial; bribes to bureaucrats, politicians and the gendarmerie, the cops, Border Patrol, etc.

Coupling the “mordida” with power and Sir Edmund Burke’s axiom that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and applying the two to Mexico, we see a second-world country crumbling before our eyes.

Now with a national turmoil over the disappearance of the 43 students in the State of Guerrero and the direct involvement of a PRD mayor and his wife plus the ineffectiveness and resignation of the PRD state governor, the PRD has reached the bottom of the political well.

— Raoul Lowery Contreras

The political and economic progress made by National Action Party (PAN) Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon between 2000 and 2012 is being frittered away by the return of the 70-year-long quasi-dictatorship of the 84-year-old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its ultra-leftist illegitimate offspring, the “revolutionary” Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

The PRD was founded in 1989 by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of former leftist private property-seizing President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940), who ran for president and lost the 1988 Mexican election by fraud he claimed.

He had served as the PRI governor of the important state of Michoacan from 1980 through 1986. He governed as a leftist PRI governor and ran as a leftist candidate for president. He organized his new political party as a leftist alternative to the entrenched center-left PRI and the center-right up-start PAN.

The PRD was and is ultra-leftist in philosophical orientation — and corrupt in practice.

The current political chaos in Mexico is caused by PRD local politicians in the State of Guerrero (Acapulco) being directly involved in the disappearance of 43 college students on September 26th and the subsequent discovery of dozens of burned corpses in mass burial sites.

Local police officers directed by the local PRD mayor and his wife – Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de Los Angeles – allegedly disappeared the 43 students with help from the local drug cartel leader.

More: PRD Governor Angel Aguirre of the State of Guerrero resigned his office in light of the student disappearance just a few miles from the governor’s mansion and the involvement of PRD officials.

When Mexicans demanded real investigations into the mass disappearance of the students and the dozens of bodies discovered in mass graves, they had to turn to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who thought that his economic policies would divert attention from the war on “narcotraficantes” – drug cartels – that his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, waged during his presidency.

President Peña Nieto directly and indirectly pledged to ease up on the “war” and concentrate on economics, thinking that would raise Mexico’s standing in the world economy and that rising prosperity would continue Mexico’s march toward a top-six world economy in less than 10 years.

A "war"-weary Mexican nation voted for Peña Nieto in 2012 and he has made some innovative moves on oil, real property ownership, law enforcement and judicial processes as well as public relations to entice foreign investment. Predictably he has fallen short on the war on crime, drugs and now, mass student executions.

Whether or not Mexicans will punish his PRI associates next year in the congressional elections no one knows, but as certain as the disinfecting sunlight showing on the PRD, one can expect a potential political disaster in those elections for the PRD.

Ever since “Governor” Cardenas founded the PRD, it has been a political problem. In the 2000 election it managed to run second after Vicente Fox’s PAN and split the normal PRI vote allowing Fox to win with less than 50 percent.

Six years later, a former PRI Tabasco State governor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, ran for president and was barely beaten by PAN’s Felipe Calderon. The PRD swept southern Mexico and lost Northern Mexico.

Lopez Obrador protested his loss claiming to have won. He called for a nationwide worker strike and shut down downtown Mexico City for weeks. Mexico’s economy took a huge hit. He organized a rump “government” by swearing himself in as the “real” President of Mexico and traveled around the country “appointing” officials to his rump government. Mexicans tired of his pompous disregard for their vote and he slipped out of sight.

Now with a national turmoil over the disappearance of the 43 students in the state of Guerrero and the direct involvement of a PRD mayor and his wife, plus the ineffectiveness and resignation of the PRD state governor, the PRD has reached the bottom of the political well.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the PRD candidate in the 1994 and 2000 presidential elections, has resigned from the party he founded.

"I am resigning irrevocably as a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution," he wrote in a letter to the Party Chairman.

His reasons: the party’s direction, leadership and office holder participation in the disappearance of students on September 26th.

After the party’s embarrassment of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s shameless refusal to accept defeat, the resignation of its founder appears to be a political death rattle for the Mexican political Party of the Democratic Revolution. Good!

Raoul Lowery Contreras is a political consultant. He was formerly with the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate. Contreras's books are available at Amazon.comLike us on FacebookFollow us on Twitter& Instagram